Re: [malware-list] [RFC 0/5] [TALPA] Intro to alinuxinterfaceforon access scanning

Pavel Machek
2008-08-19T11:00:42Z

On Sun 2008-08-17 20:07:39, Rik van Riel wrote:
> On Mon, 18 Aug 2008 00:58:44 +0200
> Pavel Machek <pavel@suse.cz> wrote:
>
> > Rather than modify all the applications using mmap (you can't tell if
> > the other side is going to use it for shared memory... right?), we
> > could simply modify all the Windows-facing applications using mmap.
>
> If web browsers, office suites and mail clients on Windows
> have certain kinds of vulnerabilities, it is safe to assume
> that the same programs on Linux will have similar problems.
>
> Can we please get rid of the idea that "Windows facing" is
> where the whole malware problem is?
>
> As for how to solve it - lets try to come up with a solution
> that is reasonably high performance and can be used for more
> than just malware scanning.

Don't mix exploits with viruses -- they are different.

Exploit is where application does something very unexpected due to a
bug.

Virus is where machine works correctly, but user does something
stupid.

For exploits, randomization + patching + compartments seem like a
solution. We should be working on "how to confine openoffice.org so
that it can't do much damage" instead of "how to detect .doc documents
that makes openoffice.org do something unexpected".

Pavel
--
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